Monthly Archives: May 2014

Earthquakes have accelerated beyond the record-setting pace described in Rockin’ and Rollin’ with sixteen magnitude 6.0 quakes in the first sixteen days of May. So we’re running at the rate of one major quake per day. Here’s the list:

Date/Time

Magnitude

Place

2014-05-16T11:01:42

6

113km NE of Grande Anse, Guadeloupe

2014-05-15T10:16:41

6.2

50km WSW of Alim, Philippines

2014-05-15T08:16:34

6.6

96km SSE of Ifalik, Micronesia

2014-05-14T20:56:13

6.1

99km SSE of Ifalik, Micronesia

2014-05-13T06:35:24

6.5

108km SSE of Punta de Burica, Panama

2014-05-12T18:38:37

6.5

Southern East Pacific Rise

2014-05-10T07:36:01

6

11km W of Tecpan de Galeana, Mexico

2014-05-08T17:00:17

6.4

15km N of Tecpan de Galeana, Mexico

2014-05-07T04:20:33

6.1

96km SW of Panguna, Papua New Guinea

2014-05-06T20:52:26

6.1

West Chile Rise

2014-05-05T11:08:43

6

9km S of Mae Lao, Thailand

2014-05-04T20:18:24

6

23km ESE of Ito, Japan

2014-05-04T09:25:14

6.1

South of the Fiji Islands

2014-05-04T09:15:53

6.6

South of the Fiji Islands

2014-05-02T08:43:37

6

70km SSE of Namlea, Indonesia

2014-05-01T06:36:35

6.6

201km WNW of Ile Hunter, New Caledonia

And Oklahoma, famous for tornadoes but hardly for quakes, has seen an incredible increase in earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater, from about two per year from 1975-2008, to forty per year in recent years:

The US Geological Survey found that from 1975 to 2008, central Oklahoma experienced one to three 3.0-magnitude earthquakes a year, compared with an average of forty per year from 2009 to 2013. And it looks like that number is going to get bigger. It’s only February, and the state has already logged more than twenty-five quakes of 3.0-magnitude or larger this year, and more than 150 total quakes in the past week alone.

In a country where real estate development has played an outsized role in their long economic boom–and on a planet where Chinese economic growth has contributed greatly to the world not sliding off into total Depression–these dropoffs are shocking. The Chinese government has been well aware that they have a real estate bubble, and they’ve been trying to deflate it gradually, but those numbers don’t quite equate with “gradual.” Their solution to bring things back to life? What else? No money down!

“In 1990, Tokyo’s total land value accounts for 63.3pc of US GDP, while Hong Kong reached 66.3pc in 1997. Now, the total land value in Beijing is 61.6pc of US GDP, a dangerous level,” said Mr Mao.

“Mr Mao said China’s house production per 1,000 head of population reached 35 in 2011. The figure is below 12 in most developed economies “even when the housing market is hot; no country has a figure of greater than 14”.

The Chinese have been so enamored of real estate that they’ve been buying lots of it in California as well:

In California, Chinese nationals and immigrants are “parking their cash in single-family homes,” said Meyers.

In Irvine, Calif., for example, 80% of sales over the past year were to Chinese buyers, he said.”

This is a massive amount of targeted home purchasing in one city. I’ve had a few contacts that sell homes in the Orange County market telling me that 7 out of 10 purchases were going to Chinese buyers, all with cash offers…Irvine is no small city with 230,000+ people living in the city.

These frenzies always work out so well in the long term. Sure. (Do I even need to say it to anyone considering buying residential real estate in California, where bidders now present PowerPoint presentations about their offers to the owners? Be careful out there!!!)

And speaking of China and instability, Japan and China have been rattling the war sabers, but most aren’t aware that they are in a no-holds-barred currency war, with each country struggling to take down the value of its own currency to try to make their exports cheaper in world markets. Currency wars don’t generally end well.

And China has territorial disputes not only with Japan, but with Viet Nam and the Philippines as well. We’ll cover those in a separate post on how the War Cycle is progressing.

And what about instability in the banking system. So far this year there have been sixteen high-profile banker deaths: murders by angry customers, suicides, and mystery deaths. By mystery deaths I mean deaths under very suspicious circumstances where the deceased gave no indication at all of wanting to commit suicide, for example, sending an e-mail to a spouse arranging that night’s dinner plans–just an hour before they jump out of a 30th floor window? Some of these people were involved in government investigations of their activities and so they may have known more than their employers wanted them to divulge. Or perhaps these employers–it turns out that the four largest US banks hold $680 Billion in life insurance on their individual employees–simply want to collect on some insurance policies. And trying to find out about this doesn’t work because the US regulators are calling this a “trade secret” of each of the banks:

And here is the strange story of a guy who worked for the US Federal Reserve for 26 years threatening his boss, the head of a major US housing agency, with murder, apparently over a bad job review the boss gave him!?!

In February, the WHO found that polio had also returned to Iraq, where it spread from neighboring Syria. It is also circulating in Afghanistan (where it spread from Pakistan) and Equatorial Guinea (from neighboring Cameroon) as well as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

I guess those countries are on the Who’s Who list of instability.

This post could go on and on, but I’ll end with a high-quality video showing some of the earth changes and extreme weather in April:

This is strictly an opinion piece, I will not try to prove my case with links, charts, and so forth. An attempt to prove the case would be seriously lengthy, a project for which I don’t currently have the time and which I doubt most would want to read.

There is a very bright golden light on the horizon for precious metal prices, but that light is on the horizon (let’s say the first half of August), not right here. In other words, I think prices will drop first before they start rising in a serious way. I see four separate price, time, and trend patterns that include an expectation that price falls first before it takes off to the upside in a big way. And these patterns are supported by the seasonal pattern for gold which shows prices typically falling in the Summer and then turning up sometime in August.

So for anyone who has savings to deploy in the metals, the setup is ideal: you should get lower prices over the next couple of months for your buying, with an expectation that your buying will be followed by the start of a major price rally, that is, the prices available over the next several weeks should be quite a bargain.

For those of you who bought your metals years back–hopefully at prices that are still well below where they are now–and who have no additional buying power, you’ll need to be patient here, but as implied above, a price drop dead ahead will be an elegant completion of major recognizable patterns (based on four entirely different types of calculations) that have an exceedingly high probability of being the end of this general price downmove that started in late 2011. These patterns all clearly indicate that the bull market in metals that started early in this century still has many years to run, and that the best upward price movement is definitely still ahead of us.

Of course this could all be wrong if some huge war breaks out, in which case prices could go up and never look back. But if things are allowed to work out with “only” the normal amount of accelerating instability that is the most important trend of our time, then these reliable price, time, and trend patterns are likely to complete as outlined above. In any case, no matter what, prices should turn up for good later in the Summer.

This post is an attempt to keep emotions out of the precious metals picture so that as many of us as possible own some when we will all truly need them down the road. (I am serious about the word need; my repeated posting about gold and silver has nothing to do with an “investment scheme” to get rich quick or with having the “right asset class in your diversified portfolio,” I am talking about what people will soon need.) As their propaganda on this topic and their dirty tricks clearly show, the Powers That Were want you to get emotional and make the mistake of avoiding or selling physical metals so that they can accumulate more metals for themselves at low prices. I’m hoping that everyone who reads Thundering Heard is well prepared to fend off, or even capitalize on, their tricks.